open mind > > > > > > messy contents

In 2004, I tried a traditional Burmese herbal shampoo called Shwe Tayaw (pictured above) sold on the side of the road. It came in a plastic bag and was kind of tannic and slimy. There was a half a lime and some shrubbery in the bag, too.

I squeezed out a bit and massaged it into my hair. The lime smelled lovely in my guesthouse shower on the Thai-Burma border, but the mixture did not suds up or lather, which gave me pause. I rinsed it out and when my hair dried, it felt a little oily (after all, there were no suds), but it also had shape, volume and a wonderful sheen. I did go back to my shampoo out of habit and perhaps fear, but the idea of a natural herbal shampoo like this stuck with me for years.

I’ve been waiting 10 years for Shwe Tayaw to become available in the US and it never has. But something similar is finally available, thanks to Michael Gordon, the creator of the Bumble and Bumble line of hair care products.Gordon has released a new product called Purely Perfect, and the ingredients are roughly described as Aloe Vera Gel, Sunflower Seed Oil, Primrose Oil, Peppermint Oil and Keratin.

I tried making my own a few days ago based on this basic ingredient list, and am working on the recipe for my thick and oily, straight hair. The recipe still needs refining, but basically it’s:

6 parts Aloe Vera Gel

1 part Apple Cider Vinegar

1/4 part Sunflower Seed Oil

a few drops of peppermint oil (I used 2 drops for my first batch, which used 3 TBSP of Aloe Vera Gel)

The Apple Cider Vinegar is to cut the grease of my hair — people often use it as a hair rinse instead of conditioner when paired with a castille soap-based shampoo that’s more likely to leave residue. Sunflower Seed oil has low viscosity and is high in Vitamins A, E, and D which make it easily absorbing without clogging pores, and great for overall skin health and even immunity.

The peppermint and primose oils have anti-inflammatory properties, and some say they’re good for everything from menstrual cramps to eczema to viral or microbial infections.

I mixed this all up in a glass bowl with a rubber spatula, and then scooped it into a travel toiletries tube to experiment with.

There are three reasons I’m excited about this No-poo (no-shampoo) concept. One is that it supposedly eliminates the need for conditioner and styling products to make one’s hair seem more “lived in”. In my case, that means 3 different products to tame fly aways and create moisture and definition. I like the idea of reducing my reliance on expensive cosmetic products that function to create a reliance on consuming more products. So far, on Day 2, I don’t have to use conditioner or product, and with just a little touch of a flat iron, my hair looks clean but textured. Definitely a lived in and not a squeaky clean look, though.

For me, reducing my reliance on expensive products related to the Yogic principle of non-grasping and the Buddhist precept of non-adornment. It all comes down to counteracting our desires to accumulate and be immodest, self centered and vain. This one’s complicated, I know.

The second reason is that I’ve been following some of the emerging scientific data around the human microbiome — the hundreds of trillions of bacteria that live in our guts, in our mouths and on our skin. And that we might discover each has a role in making us healthy, if only we’d stop wiping them out with antibiotics… and even surfactants, or soaps! Here’s a sampling from The New York Times:

Here are some articles that appeared in the most recent Sunday New York Times that suggest it was written just for me:

An article on Diamond Dallas Page, who has the amazingly hilarious tagline “Not Yo Mama’s Yoga!” (cue fist smashing through the screen), and how his macho yoga is saving pro wrestlers from addiction, pain and death

A short time after Sweetheart and I moved to Providence, I saw a flyer in a coffee shop (Sidenote: This, Facebook events and word of mouth are how you learn about all good things in Providence) for compost pickup through the EcoRI Earth project. Not only was it a great way to do something with my kitchen scraps, it also helped support EcoRI’s sustainability reporting throughout New England.

But we lived in a third floor walkup without air conditioning, and didn’t generate enough food scraps to merit paying for it to be picked up every single week. I started looking for ways to mitigate the smell of 2 weeks’ worth of food scraps in the summer months, and came up short. (Thanks for nothing, internet.)

So let’s get real: composting isn’t easy. It smells, invites fruit flies and other pests into your house, and can make a mess. It can even lead to domestic disputes, breaking down its supposed feel-good benefits. So what are some of the solutions to stinky city composting out there?

So let’s get real: composting isn’t easy. It smells, invites fruit flies and other pests into your house, and can make a mess. It can even lead to domestic disputes, breaking down its supposed feel-good benefits. So what are some of the solutions to stinky city composting out there?

There are a zillion kind of food scrap bins with these charcoal filters built in — ours worked particularly well when we lived in a 1-bedroom house in Bloomington, IN because I could step outside, dump it out and then give it a good rinse with a garden hose. This becomes quite necessary when the food scraps really pile up, and when fruit fly larvae and eggs end up in the little nooks and crannies of your bin (gross). And it still smells up your kitchen.

I think there are even some powders sold out there that you can sprinkle in your food scraps to keep the smell down, but that sounds too complicated (and too good to be true).

Thankfully, EcoRI’s compost program manager emailed his list of participants (scrappers?) and gave us one helluva tip, and totally inadvertently: the freezer! Manager Kevin was actually addressing issues of what brown stuff can go into compost (pizza boxes? newspaper? paper towels?) and mentioned offhand that “some people store their foodscraps in brown paper bags in the freezer until collection day. The whole bag can be placed in the bucket.”

What the what? This was a gamechanger. I started folding or cutting down the tops of the brown paper grocery bags we had in large supply, and throwing food scraps into them (in the freezer) whenever I had them. Come collection day, the whole bag went in the bucket and got picked up.

No smell, no fruit flies. Basically, a composting miracle.

What a long way I’ve come. Back in Washington, DC, we had a compost pile in the backyard of our 4-unit apartment building that would occasionally be marauded by raccoons and that honestly was never going to result in potting soil. There were some sweaty afternoons spent turning the compost and mending chicken wire but I didn’t even know about “seasoning” compost, a step that’s required before you can use compost as potting soil without killing your houseplants.

I didn’t even know about “seasoning” compost, a step that’s required before you can use compost as potting soil without killing your houseplants.

When I had first heard that there was compost pick up at the local farmers market in Providence, I dutifully carried my full and smelly food scraps bucket on my bicycle the 2 miles there, up several hills — only to discover the pickup had been phased out. Getting my food scraps picked up from my house every other week was a major step forward. Some things that made paying to have it picked up even better:

If we had stuck around Providence, I would have gotten some real potting soil composted by professionals delivered to me,

The rest of the compost went to fertilize local urban farms, and

The nominal cost of pickup ($8/bucket) helped to fund local reporting about important environmental issues.

I wrote kind of a long comment in response to Dawn’s wonderful post lauding the courage in the face of uncertainty that adopting this alternative model requires, which I’ll repost here:

I am very appreciative of the inherent uncertainty and courage that this kind of co-directorship embodies, Dawn, Katie and Deb!

The lived experience of being ‘the boss’ in traditional pryamid models of leadership we know can be incredibly stressful, and produces outcomes that are far from ideal. There’s tremendous pressure to perform with mastery despite the fact that we’re all incomplete and ever-evolving beings. Not to mention young! How much wisdom can one person have in 3 years, 15 years or even in a human lifetime?

Leaders in this model also lack critical clarity around their principal relationships in community: Is the team there to support the boss? Or to be supported by her? Can a board of directors guide and nurture leadership? Or is it there to simply hire and fire?

Venturing into co-directorship sounds like distributing what could be the burdens of leadership, while still empowering each co-director to determine the future of BPF. It seems rich and visionary in its very contradictions…

Venturing into co-directorship sounds like distributing what could be the burdens of leadership, while still empowering each co-director to determine the future of BPF. It seems rich and visionary in its very contradictions: You may each exist as an individual leader, alone, while also being unable to lead without each other. You are each desperately vital, but have reduced (or eliminated?) the ego fertilizer of being the one and only indispensable boss on top.

I can’t think of a better reflection of making our way through The Stream — each of us alone in our approach and determination, but buoyed by faith in possibility, what tools we have from our experiences, and the support of community. (Aka, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.)

I hope you’ll write a lot about what you learn in the coming years! It will be important documentation for a new generation of Millennial leaders who value consensus decision-making and work-life balance as we grow and build on the world we grew up in.

And welcome, Deb!!!!!

I’ll also add that this experiment is a wonderful early indicator of the kinds of alternative leadership and organizational models we’ll see emerge as more Millennials grow into power in the next five to ten years.

It gives an overview of various economic and corporate systems that will be disrupted by the Millennial Generation. I found the section on Millennial Values especially interesting, and it lays out how our values lay the foundation for the disruption of traditional leadership and organizational models — like Buddhist Peace Fellowship is already doing!

I am very pleased — and a little scared — to announce that I’m going to be blogging regularly with Turning Wheel Media, a project of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship!

I’ve long admired BPF, and even more so since Dawn Haney and Katie Loncke took the helm as co-directors. It has become a rich and diverse place for many voices in the American sangha to live into our practice by bringing compassion and critical inquiry to political, social and economic issues.

Just wanted to share this awesome newsletter from Chowgirls Killer Catering in Minneapolis, an independent and locally woman-owned catering company that I’m privileged to be working with for my wedding in a few weeks.

It’s probably not useful for me to apologize for how long it has been since I posted here or in general tended to this blog. It’s a reflection mostly of falling off the meditation practice wagon.

Except for one non-residential weekend metta retreat at Brown University, I haven’t been on a retreat since New Years 2012-13. I recently found a group to sit with once a month, but my attempts to find a more consistent practice group have failed miserably.

Am I too picky? Maybe. But I haven’t been able to settle into a sangha as simply a container to do my own practice while others do theirs. I want a sense of relating, shared practice and shared values. That’s what sangha really brings to me. I chafe too much in the meditation or Buddhist communities that are all white Baby Boomers and I bristle at the idea of “meditation classes”.

Without sangha, I’ve been left alone to my own devices. Television — sci fi, fantasy and melodrama — has found a bigger role in my life. (But at least it’s not reality tv.) I turn the radio on or sing a song in my own head when I encounter silence. The muscle I exercise most is the one involved in either turning away or charging in and stilling has become hard to reach.

The muscle I exercise most is the one involved in either turning away or charging in and stilling has become hard to reach.

A friend recently returned from his first visit to the Philippines in almost 30 years — his first trip there as an adult. He is going through the pangs of separation and withdrawal:

“It’s 3:30am California Time. I’m wide awake walking around my house searching for pieces of the Philippines to hold onto; the taste of coconut husk smoke in the humid morning air, the cacophony of jeeps and motorcycles fighting through EDSA, the sound of wavelets kissing the shore before dawn, some newly fried fish with golden mango, soft bronze faces whose smiles remind you of sunshine and love. I can’t find any of those things at this hour so I just go back to staring at pictures of home.”

That’s what I feel like. I had a sense of home once. I can still taste it on my lips, but it’s gone. I’m searching for it but find myself searching in the wrong places — in front of a screen, in the current of busyness — and getting lost in melancholy.

Not too long ago, I knew in my skin and fascia what it was to float in the deep, dark and still oceans of the Dharma. These days I am caught responding to one seaborne crisis after another — not infrequently making things worse by my effort. It reminds me of the wonderful move “All Is Lost” Sweetheart and I saw a few months ago, except without the slow, steely determination and the raw and deliberate calm of being actually lost at sea.

As I mentioned 14 months ago, Sweetheart and I are getting married! The big day is coming up soon — June 7, in Sweetheart’s hometown of Minneapolis.

I stand by what I said before: that people don’t actually care that much about wedding planning, no matter how much they kindly ask about it. I think for the most part that’s less a reflection of their interest as it is of their compassion for the planner, knowing that my life outside of work has been taken up by run of show calendars, budgets, guestlists and a seemingly endless onslaught of wedding-related advertising.

Indeed, the wedding industrial complex is a huge force to be reckoned with, as Catherine Rampell’s December 2013 article on wedding price gouging writes in the New York Times. There are several forces at play that make planning a wedding an expensive and stressful affair:
– social pressures related to how we socialize girls to think about weddings and marriage
– complete and utter lack of transparency around planning and pricing
– the fact that, ostensibly, you’re only going to do this once (and once you do, you throw your wedding dream board into a closet)

As with most things, I’ve been figuring this out as I go. Sweetheart and I sat down at the beginning of planning to agree on a few things, but otherwise I’ve been plowing ahead with the invaluable help of a few awesome people for the past year plus. And since searching wedding blogs, magazines and books hasn’t turned up much help, I want to share some of my own practical tips and experiences with the blogosphere on planning a 21st century progressive Millennial wedding. I’m realizing this will probably be a lot of information, so I’m going to split it up into several posts covering The Wedding Planner, The Officiant, The Vendors, The Food, The Clothes and then a few Resources.

THE WEDDING PLANNER
The first thing I did was find a wedding planner. Rather than rely on the internet, I asked around — specifically, I asked a friend with experience planning big events in the creative community and with a collaborative coworking space in Minneapolis for leads.

The first recommendation was a gem: Pablo Jones. Pablo doesn’t usually do weddings — he’s actually a musician and theater artist who also plans fundraisers, political events and high impact educational events for the likes of CoCo Minneapolis. He occasionally plans weddings for friends.

We spent our first phone call exchanging our personal stories — who we are, how we got to where we are now — and I was sold when Pablo said he wasn’t interested in planning the ceremony so much as just helping me get all the bigger pieces in place like vendors, location and overall planning strategy. I was even more enthusiastic when I explained to him that it would be important to consider racially and otherwise diverse candidates when hiring vendors and a Day Of Associate — and he was able to name 2-3 people off the bat who fit the bill.

I was sold when our prospective wedding planner Pablo said he wasn’t interested in planning the ceremony

We set up a Basecamp project to help with assigning tasks and To Dos and got going, at a rate of $100/hr for Pablo, and $50/hr for a Day of Associate we’d meet later.

For the past 14 months, Pablo has recommended caterers, locations and photographers. We’ve probably had 5 30-60 minute phonecalls over that time and each conversation has felt like reviewing a plan of action with a good boss or colleague — he’s supportive, steady and communicates clearly about what needs to be done next. He’s also been indispensably helpful in providing a sample contract for our musicians, reviewing a contract with the caterer and helping set expectations about budget, etc. Once in a while, he makes phone calls to a local vendor who’s not being responsive to me, flexing his relationship and vouching for this persistent, Type A Cancer.

I have a lot of confidence that everything will be squared away by 6/7 and that the Day of Associate will make the actual day run smoothly so Sweetheart, our families and I can focus on being present and celebrating.

THE OFFICIANT
Karl Jones, a friend of Sweetheart’s parents, will be officiating our wedding. Karl is awesome and though he was a professional pianist for years, he’s now in the process of being ordained as a Palliative Care Minister. He is currently reveling in his second marriage and has spent hours with us already meditating on marriage.

Throughout our time together, Karl has come back to the one condition he has for marrying us: that we stay married. He backed this up by actually encouraging us not to get married. I can’t say how invaluable it has been to have someone sober us up every few months and let us know that if we have doubts, it’s important to heed them. And that we’re allowed to!

Throughout our time together, our officiant Karl has come back to the one condition he has for marrying us: that we stay married. He backed this up by actually encouraging us not to get married.

We’re still working through our relationship with Karl, so I’ll leave more reflections on his role for after the wedding. But it’s important to say that it was important to us to find someone on the same wavelength who would guide us in approaching marriage as a lifelong commitment that would require work, courage, strength and vulnerability. This is serious business.

So we had an initial conversation to lay our cards out on the table — what we were looking for and what we weren’t looking for in the ceremony and his role. And we shared with Karl remarks from the officiant at two friends’ wedding that we appreciated a lot and a reading we knew would be part of the ceremony.

We agreed to chew on a sobering list of things Karl described that could and often do break marriages — from money, to timeliness, to sex, to household chores — and to talk again via video call at least once before the wedding not just to talk logistics, but to talk about what we are learning about our relationship and marriage as the wedding approaches.

We agreed to chew on a sobering list of things Karl described that could and often do break marriages — from money, to timeliness, to sex, to household chores

The next call is two weeks out from the wedding — apparently a common time for second thoughts and cold feet!

Sweetheart had this song stuck in his head so badly, that he ordered the new EP from New Zealand singer, Lorde, all the way from Australia a few weeks ago.

This Saturday, it finally arrived. He put it on the stereo and now we’re equally obsessed. So much so, that we now have a zany plan to go down to New York to see her perform at Webster Hall on a Monday night — the same day her first full length album drops.

There are several things that amaze me about Lorde — née Ella Yelich-O’Connor. One is that she’s 16 years old, which makes her the youngest woman ever to top Billboard’s Alternative songs chart and belies the maturity and shrewd business sense Lorde demonstrates through her lyrics (she writes all her songs), music videos, intentional lack of promotion of her singles, and most of all her exceptional poise and confidence even in live performance. To that last point, notice the absolutely brilliant, minimal production on “Royals” — no synth, one baseline, one drum line, and just Lorde’s voice layered on itself.

Another thing, and in retrospect this is not surprising at all, is that she inhabits the periphery of the music world, if not the world, being from Auckland. It seems to be something she’s quite aware of — in her newest single, “Team”, the chorus references her life away from the lights and glamor of New York, Paris and LA: “We live in cities you’ll never see on screen // Not very pretty but we sure know how to run free”.

There’s something about that outsider perspective, made so not outsider anymore by the internet and mass produced pop culture of course, that allows her to both live into and reject what’s been established by the mainstream. In “Royals”, Lorde rejects the material excess glorified by musicians like Kanye West, Rihanna and Jay-Z: “… every song’s like gold teeth, grey goose, trippin’ in the bathroom… / We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams. / But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your time piece. / Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash. / We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair.”

And it’s not just a matter of preference, there’s an acknowledgment (“And we’ll never be royals // It don’t run in our blood”) that these systems of hierarchy and privilege are only conferred on some and rely on exclusion — an implicit rejection of the American dream that there is but one embodiment of success we can all achieve if we try; a presumption that it’s a dream we all share and want. I’m sure it factors in that she has a white, suburban, middle class family. It’s easier to reject material wealth when you’ve grown up secure.

I searched high and low on the internet for teachers and studios in Providence before going to Tom’s class. For a while there, I really wasn’t sure if I’d be able to find a place that could hold our practices in a way that felt good.

Attachment was a big part of it: We just felt so lucky and grateful for Debby Harris in Bloomington, whose Ashtanga Primary Series kept us grounded and growing every Wednesday. So I thought, because of how well we did with the repeating sequence, we needed to find a similar Ashtanga class here in RI. And while it seems there were many Ashtanga classes here in the past, they’ve all dried up!

I tried Tom’s class because of the stellar reviews online, including one from an Ashtanga teacher who gave Tom a glowing referral but no longer teaches in Providence, but also because his bio listed Ashtanga experience as well.

There’s a lot of “Vinyasa” being thrown around as a term in town, and a lot of “Power” and “hot” yoga, as well. And even Tom lists his class as “Slow Vinyasa”. But if I’ve learned anything from my search, it’s that these labels don’t mean much at this moment — they do little to indicate what the form and content of a class is going to be.

What we found is a wonderful space with diverse, dedicated students and a teacher glowing with commitment. And now, he has the Sweetheart seal of approval, too. We’re looking forward to becoming regular installments at Eyes of the World Yoga! (There’s even a meditation sit before yoga class!)